Peter Higgs and the elusive particle

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The scientific community is still jumping for joy over the potential discovery of the illusive Higgs boson particle.

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British theoretical physicist, Dr. Peter Higgs, could win the Nobel Prize, 50 years after his groundbreaking work.

I’d love to explain this but like most of the population I have no idea what they are talking about or why they’re so freaking excited.

So, why am I freaking excited? Because it was announced to the world by people who are leading the rest of us into the future. The more knowledge we have as species, the likelihood of the superstitious dogma that stalks the Earth like a specter will be slowly, but surely eradicated. Now, that’s exciting.

Sure, sometimes scientific breakthroughs get hijacked by politicians and turned into weapons of mass destruction.

Science has turned war, or the potential of all-out war into a horror show. Just like there are evil politicians, there are scientists whose hands and minds can be turned to work for the dark side. But, unlike politicians, the majority of scientists only care about their science.

The popular media has Christened the discovery the ‘God Particle’ and as our Chris Buescher pointed out, that really pisses the scientific community off. So it should, Dr. Peter Higgs, and a handful of his peers, deserve all the credit for imagining that such a unseeable particle could even exist. Go science.

What does this discovery mean for the future?

Like all good scientists they cannot say what it means. It will take many years to analyze what was found by CERN. Lots of papers and books will be written, read, understood, disagreed with and fought over. But, that’s science, these guys spend their lives, working, reading and writing within their field and are still not sure about things. Unlike some people, who read one book and think they know everything.

What it could mean is that the third Dr. Who, a famous Time Lord, was really an actor named Jon Pertwee, who did advertising for kids jigsaw puzzles in his spare time. Please don’t let this be true. Science can be so cruel.

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Story edited from an earlier version written by former contributor Jimmy James.

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Professor Mike

Professor Mike is a left-leaning, dog loving, political junkie. He has written dozens of articles for Substack, Medium, Simily, and Tribel. Professor Mike has been published at Smerconish.com, among others. He is a strong proponent of the environment, and a passionate protector of animals. In addition he is a fierce anti-Trumper. Take a moment and share his work.
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E.A. Blair
11 years ago

Illusive or elusive?

“Where intelligence unfortunately does work reasonably well is in the sciences. Really smart men have ideas; lesser men, usually engineers, make them explode; the least men get the triggers. This suggests that we ought to put a bounty on engineers.”

— Fred Reed in Thinking About Intelligence: More Trouble Than It’s Worth

Personally, I’d rather put the bounty on the triggermen.

Who can say what will happen when research on the Higgs boson moves from the theory stage to the application stage. Who among their contemporaries could have imagined what Ørsted and Sturgeon’s early experiments in magnetism would lead to, yet electromagnetism is, more than anything else, the foundation of most of modern technology.

11 years ago

Jimmy James? I went to high school in Virginia with a Jimmy James. It would be amazing if this were to be the same person!

Yes, it’s true that, in most cases, a scientist cannot tell you what the end result of their investigations may be. They are seeking knowledge and that’s enough. That’s why the most exciting expression in research is not “Eureka!” but “That’s odd.”

Reply to  Professor Mike
11 years ago

I would have been amazed if it were the same Jimmy James. This was a guy that flunked chemistry twice and barely passed anything else. It would definitely fall under the “That’s odd” category.

Even so, another classmate that I doubted would even graduate is now a successful lawyer in South Alabama.

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